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Open Source Bridge 2011: Day 3 Liveblog

1545: Keeping Agile at the Heart of the Internet,Larissa Shapiro. This turns out to be a Scrum overview. Not what I expected.

1430: Data Warehousing 101, Josh Berkus. “Big data” is relative to contemporary typical commercial data sizes. Archiving: WORN data. Usually needed for regulatory compliance, and has very liberal response time requirements. Data mining: You don’t know what’s in there, but you want to find out. Semi-structured, lots of data, data is produced as a side effect of other business processes. Analytics/BI/DSS/OLAP: Use large amounts of data to produce interesting and informative visualizations.

1330: Technical Debt, Elizabeth Naramore. Code or practices that will hinder your future progress. Too much cripples the team. This is another talk where you’re very happy to not recognize your code or practices in anything that’s up on the screen. Hmm, Sonar.

1100: The History of Concurrency, Michael Schurter. I’m sitting in a talk in 2011, viewing a slide listing Algol 60 and 68 and Simula 67 and DTSS. Let’s do the time warp again! (I loved Algol 60, back in the day.) Erlang, Go. Great talk!

1000: The Independent Software Developer, Peat Bakke. Maintain an absolute firewall between your commercial and personal work. Bring in enough income to pay the bills and give yourself time to work on open source. Etc. Suggested a billing ratio of .7 if you have constant, reliable clients, and .5 if you spend much time finding new work. Hire an attorney and accountant to write your contract, do your billing, and do your payroll.

Finding clients: Asking other developers about contracts isn’t productive, because you’re a competitor. Go to events where you’ll be the only technical geek in the room, where you’ll be the only person in the room who provides your services. The rules: Showing up to is half the battle; schedule a follow-on meeting to learn more about the other party’s business after the first contact; give them a mutual NDA; be able to point to prior work as a demonstration of how you can solve their problem, or walk them through the problem-solving process; produce a reliable estimate of what your services will cost them; and always remain positive.

0900: For the third year in a row, Portland Mayor Sam Adams gives a keynote address. The kind of keynote that would never be given to an open source group by a Seattle mayor.